Colin

by E. F. Benson

Now Colin’s presence gave solidity to it all; it was as if the sunlit mist had been withdrawn from the dim slopes which it covered, and lo! the reality was not mean or prosaic, but had absorbed the very tints and opalescences which had cloaked it. There was Colin, eager and sympathetic, yet checking any question of his own, and but thirsty for what his father might give him, and in the person of the boy who was the only creature in the world whom Philip loved, and in whom Rosina lived, that tawdry romance of his was glorified. To tell Colin, about his mother here, in the places where they had lived together, was to make a shrine of them.

The flat which he and Rosina had occupied in Naples, when the autumnal departure of visitors from Capri rendered the island so desolating to her urban nature, happened to be untenanted, and a couple of lire secured their admittance. It still held pieces of furniture which had been there twenty years ago, and Colin, moving quietly to and fro, his eyes alight with interest in little random memories which his father recalled, was like a ray of sunlight shining into a place that had long slept in dust and shadows. Mother and son reacted on each other in Philip’s mind; a new tenderness blossomed for Rosina out of his love for Colin, and he wondered at himself for not having brought them together like this before.

Here were the chairs which they used to pull out on to the veranda when the winter sun was warm; here was the Venetian looking-glass which Rosina could never pass without a glance at her image, and now, as Colin turned towards it, there were Rosina’s eyes and golden hair that flashed back at Philip out of the past and made a bridge to the present.

And there, above all, was the bedroom, with the glitter of sun on the ceiling cast there from the reflecting sea, where, at the close of a warm, windy day of March, the first cry of a new-born baby was heard. And by that same bedside, at the dawn of an April morning, Philip had seen the flame of Rosina’s life flicker and waver and expire. He regretted her more to-day than at the hour when she had left him. Some unconscious magic vested in Colin cast that spell.

For all these recollections Colin had the same eager, listening face and the grave smile. Never even in his baiting of Raymond had he shewn a subtler ingenuity in adapting his means to his end. He used his father’s affection for him to prize open the locks of a hundred caskets, and enable him to see what was therein. He wanted to know all that his father would tell him about that year which preceded his birth, and not asking questions was the surest way of hearing what he wanted.

Already he had found that his Aunt Hester knew very little about that year, or, if she knew, she had not chosen to tell him certain things. His curiosity, when he had talked to her under the elms, had been but vague and exploratory, but, it will be remembered, it had become slightly more definite when, in answer to his comment that his father and mother must have been married very soon after his arrival in Italy, Aunt Hester had given a very dry assent.

Now his curiosity was sharply aroused about that point, for with all his father’s communicativeness this morning, he had as yet said no word whatever that bore on the date of their marriage. Colin felt by an instinct which defied reason, that there was something to be known here; the marriage, the scene, the date of it, must have passed through his father’s mind, and yet he did not choose, in all this sudden breakdown of long reticence, to allude to it. That was undeniably so; a question, therefore, would certainly be useless, for believing as he did, that his father had something to conceal, he would not arrive at it in that way.

They were standing now in the window looking over the bay, and Philip pointed to the heat-veiled outline of Capri, floating, lyre-shaped, on the fusing-line of sea and sky.

“We were there all the summer,” he said, “in the villa you will see this evening. Then your mother found it melancholy in the autumn and we came here—I used to go backwards and forwards, for I couldn’t quite tear myself away from the island altogether.”

That struck Colin as bearing on his point; it was odd, wasn’t it, that a newly-married couple should do that? You would have expected them to live here or there, but together.... Then, afraid that his father would think he was pondering on that, he changed the topic altogether.